Backbars and JavaScript Bitmaps

Oh, that's right, I have a blog! I've got a bunch of old projects to document, but first, a minor diversion of this past week.

Eliazar Parra published a fabulous user-script to add "backbars" to social link sites like Digg and Reddit, where content is voted on and scored. The idea of a backbar is that each item is unobtrusively shaded with a background that corresponds with its score.

The backbars effectively transform the page into a bar chart, and in some cases it's a spectacular improvement. His Stack Overflow example highlights the shortcomings of the original design, which disguises entire orders of magnitude by turning "39,9000" into "39.9k", which has the same visual weight as "3,996".

Backbars make all the difference:

Love it!

Generating Images

However, the original implementation has external dependencies, most vexing being coloured rectangles hosted on the author's site. As a result, you can't even change backbar colours.

This led down the rabbit hole into dynamically generating the images from within the script. Most formats are frustratingly complex to implement (I am not porting zlib to JavaScript), so it had to be simple bitmaps.

Luckily, they don't only come uncompressed; there are several flavours of run-length compression, a simple scheme whereby you replace a series like redpixel + redpixel + redpixel... with a single redpixel * 100. In the case of these big blocks of colour, it takes 2 bytes to encode 255 pixels, quite a staggering improvement over the 1020 bytes of the uncompressed 24-bit version.

The end result: jsbmp, a small library for generating bitmaps in JavaScript.

Pretty useless, but there are a few intriguing possibilities. Sparklines, maybe?

Not Invented Here

And then of course I had to do something about jQuery, so I ended up reimplementing the script. Enter Admiral Backbar. (It's a trap!)